[msbarnett]

Link to the tweet that claims Amazon are themselves buying counterfeits from suppliers? Are you sure you’re not misunderstanding the situation re: comingling?

It’s precisely because of commingling that, just because you buy a book “Shipped From and Sold By Amazon” you have no guarantee that the book they ship to you was actually bought and entered into their inventory by them. Their books and every other “fulfilled by Amazon” sellers’ are treated as completely fungible by their fulfilment centres.

“Ships From and Sold by Amazon” doesn’t really mean anything re: the actual book you receive, which could easily be one that came into their system from Bob’s Big Store of Counterfeit Bullshit.

[billpollock]

These books are counterfeits. Counterfeiting is illegal and intent doesn't matter.

This is not a matter of some other seller providing Amazon with inventory. These are coming direct from a printer to Amazon and being sold in place of the legitimate inventory.

There is no third party to go after here. There's only one seller in this case. That is Amazon.

[cthalupa]

>The se are coming direct from a printer to Amazon and being sold in place of the legitimate inventory. There is no third party to go after here. There's only one seller in this case. That is Amazon.

No, it's not.

Even if it says "Shipped and sold by Amazon", it does not mean that the item originated from Amazon's purchase. Amazon considers co-mingled inventory as fungible.

Let's say Amazon has 10 warehouses, and every month, they order 100 copies of a book, and put 10 in each warehouse. Now, a third party seller comes onto the scene, and wants to sell the same book, fulfilled by Amazon, with co-mingling to reduce costs. To further reduce costs, he also only wants to send his inventory to the closest warehouse so shipping is cheaper. Let's say he has 100 copies of this book, and he sends them to warehouse 10. Amazon, seeing that there are 100 additional copies of this book in this warehouse, and knowing that demand is likely to stay relatively the same, knows that for the next 10 months, they do not have ship those 10 books a month to it. Now, Amazon has run through the stock they stored at warehouse 10, but they have an order from someone who lives down the street. They don't have any copies of the book that they purchased, but they have the co-mingled copy that should, in theory, be an exact copy of the original product. They then send it to the customer so that they have a shorter delivery time. If they were to ship all of the copies of the book that were sent to them by that seller, and had not replenished, when a customer ordered from that seller they could ship a copy from warehouse 3, but it would take an extra day to arrive. Or, someone who lives next door to warehouse 1 could order from the third party seller, but still get same day delivery because Amazon has a copy of the book there, even though it is their copy and not the seller.

This is what co-mingled inventory means. That all inventory is fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item, as long as it is properly accounted for on the ledgers. That is fundamentally the point - you save significant costs and introduce real benefits to customers when you can ignore where the item was sourced from. The problems arise when not all of the sources for the items are good actors.

Looking at the No Starch Press Serious Python book, there are 41 sellers. I don't know how many co-mingle inventory or are FBA, but that means that any book sold that from any seller that co-mingles inventory (and items sold by Amazon directly are) can be fulfilled by items physically sourced from any other seller that also co-mingles inventory.

[billpollock]

Thank you for your comment but with all due respect I'm afraid that this is a unique case.

These are counterfeit copies. They're not coming from legitimate suppliers. Frankly we don't care who resells our books as long as they're selling legitimate copies. These are not.

I've been dealing with this issue with Amazon since 2017. It's not that what you're describing doesn't happen but if this is like previous cases this is something different.

In this and other recent cases as has been shared online, Amazon replaced our legitimate inventory entirely with counterfeit copies that it was sourcing directly from a printer that it works with for print-on-demand. That printer supplies Createspace. We receive absolutely no revenue from the sale of these copies because we're not the ones printing them. They're produced from stolen files.

Once again, Amazon is stealing from authors and leaving it to vendors like us to police them. Why should we have to police Amazon?

In this case the copies that I received appear to be from that same printer. They look just like the other counterfeits that we've seen over the years.

As with other instances we receive NO revenue from these sales and as a consequence neither do our authors.

In this case and in previous cases Amazon stopped ordering directly from authorized resellers. They fulfilled orders only with counterfeit books.

This is not the case of commingling as you describe. This has nothing to do with FBA or other resellers. This is Amazon's supply chain sourcing counterfeit copies directly from a printer that they work with and selling them in place of our legitimate inventory.

[ballenf]

Could one if your authors file a copyright claim against them? I assume you don’t want to yourself for strategic reasons, but you could help as third party do so. Or would the expense far outweigh the benefit?

Love your books. FWIW, I almost entirely stopped buying from Amazon 2 years ago in part because of issues like this. Canceling prime was scary and then liberating.

[cthalupa]

Can you please explain what evidence you have that this is no co-mingling? You have a ton of people selling copies of your books - how do you know that the counterfeit copies you are receiving come from the Amazon supply chain and are not co-mingled inventory?

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Putting aside the strong allegations made by No Starch Press for a moment.

This is such a bullshit rationalisation.

If the product is treated as fungible, and it doesn't matter physically who sourced the item then of course Amazon is responsible for selling / fulfilling the counterfeit product because, as you say, it doesn’t matter physically who sourced the product.

Amazon is aware of this issue, but fixing it breaks their enabling-crime business-model.

[cthalupa]

I'm explaining how it works in theory, not rationalizing the current situation as okay.

I do think it's unfair to say Amazon isn't attempting to fight this - someone linked a website in here that shows them as employing thousands of people and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in fighting it. It just seems like they're not currently winning the arms race.